Mystery of Anne Frank’s informer revealed by Dutch author

In book published about resistance heroine author reveals relative as the prime suspect

Jewish teenager Anne Frank died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in May 1945 at the age of 15. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

One of the enduring mysteries of the second World War, the identity of the person who betrayed 15-year-old diarist Anne Frank and her family to the Nazis, has apparently been solved – by a Dutch author who has named his own aunt as the most likely traitor.

In a book published on Wednesday about Dutch resistance heroine Elizabeth “Bep” Voskuijl, her son, Joop van Wijk, reveals new evidence that his aunt, Nelly Voskuijl, was a Nazi collaborator from the age of 19 until she was 23 – and is now the prime suspect for having divulged the Franks’s hiding place.

Bep Voskuijl was a typist who worked for Anne’s father, Otto Frank. She and her father, Johan, who built the famous bookcase that hid the door to the Franks’s secret annex over the factory on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, were among the few who knew their whereabouts.

Into hiding

Anne wrote her account of their time in the annex in The Diary of a Young Girl (better known since as The Diary of Anne Frank), but the family was arrested on the morning of August 4th, 1944, when German police searched the house following a tip from an informer.

Go to your Jews

“The painful but evident conclusion is that we can add her to the long list of suspects”, the authors write in their book, Bep Voskuijl: No More Silence.For historians of the era, the informant’s identity is essentially “case closed”.

Nelly Voskuijl died in 2001.Separated from her daughters, Edith Frank died in Auschwitz, aged 44. Anne and Margot died in Bergen-Belsen, aged 15 and 19.